The Whites: A Novel (44 page)

“And it’s over,” he said.

“Over. What do you mean, ‘over.’” Then: “With just her or all of them?”

Billy shrugged.

They sat in silence for a while, Carmen joining him in looking out at the backyard.

“I’m glad,” she finally said. “Thank you.”

He wanted to say that he didn’t do it for her, but who knew.

Milton Ramos reappeared, this time sitting on the living room couch, immobile yet full of murderous despair.

Well, Billy told himself, what did you expect.

And if Carmen hadn’t seen him yet, she’d see him soon enough.

“I think I got up too early,” he said.

“Me too,” she said, reaching for, but missing, his hand. “Let’s go back to bed.”

The call from Stacey Taylor came a week later.

“I need to tell you something.”

“What’s that.”

“Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”

“Give me the headline.”

“Just have breakfast with me,” she said. “You’ll be glad you did.”

“You said that the last time.”

“This time I mean it.”

“I have a therapy session at two.”

“Physical?”

“Family.”

“Where.”

“West Forties.”

“Then come after.”

“Your whale, Curtis Taft?” she said to him over a four p.m. breakfast in another one of her tin-can diners. “He shot his girlfriend last night.”

“Girlfriend or wife?” Billy asked, thinking of Patricia Taft, big and stately, pushing a stroller that day through the atrium of the hospital.

“Girlfriend.”

“You have a funny definition of good news.”

“She’ll live,” Stacey said, fondling an unopened pack of Parliaments, “but he also clipped the first EMT coming through the door, so he’s most likely going away just this side of forever.”

So, yeah, good news, he guessed, but it left him flat. “He got away with a triple,” he said. “Skated like Brinker.”

“You catch them for what you catch them for,” she said. “You told me that.”

“Memori Williams, Tonya Howard, Dreena Bailey,” he said loudly enough to turn heads.

And Eric Cortez, Sweetpea Harris, Jeffrey Bannion, if he was taking a true tally.

The food came, two omelets that were so oily they looked shellacked.

“So, in other news,” sliding her plate to the side. “I’ve been hearing some wild rumors.”

“About . . .”

“Bad guys getting taken out by frustrated cops.”

“Frustrated, huh?” Billy thinking, Maybe the center would hold for them and maybe not, but if she had really called him here hoping he would help her out, she was dreaming. He would no more talk to her about any of his friends than they would have talked about him eighteen years earlier.

Ignoring the food, he took a sip of coffee. “Where’d you hear that?”

“You know I can’t say.”

“Journalistic ethics?” he said with more of an edge than he’d intended.

The dig deflated her like a pin. “Yeah, well, we used to hear bullshit rumors like this all the time back at the
Post
. They rarely came to anything.”

He wanted to remind her that
rarely
wasn’t the same as
never,
that eighteen years ago, when she was young and mad ambitious, words like
rarely, unlikely, implausible
would never have slowed her down—but what would have been the point.

The woman sitting across from him—gray in face and grown so bony in middle age that he could count the knobs of her spine through her pullover—just didn’t have the heart for the chase anymore;
rarely,
these days, justification enough for her to fold her tent and go home to her wine and her cigarettes and her death-wish drunk of a boyfriend.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Tell me something?” Stacey looking at him warily, not liking his suddenly breathy tone.

“It’s about me and you,” Billy thinking, She can get back in the game with this. Get back in the game and redeem her good name.

“Can I go outside for a smoke first?” she nearly pleaded, her eyes pierced with dread.

Her resistance to finally hearing the words that would vindicate the last two punishing decades of her life at first baffled him, then sobered him. What the hell was he thinking? The consequences for his family and for himself . . . 

“Forget it, it’s nothing.”

He knew she wouldn’t press, and she didn’t, Stacey masking her relief by pretending that something out on the street had caught her eye. And Billy, playing his part, started attacking his eggs as if they were edible.

“Let me ask you something,” she said after a while. “Whether you were or weren’t high that day and that psycho with the pipe was still bearing down on you like that . . . Would you have done anything differently?”

“Hypothetically?” he said. “No, I don’t think so.” Then: “No, I wouldn’t.”

Stacey went back to gazing out the window, her thin features vanishing in the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the glass.

“I mean, it’s not like I never think about getting back into some kind of reporting,” she said, tentatively pressing her fingertips against her throat. “But that sex advice column for men that I write? We had nine thousand hits last issue. Up from fifty-five hundred the issue before, up from three thousand the issue before that. So, I think it’s safe to say that I’m onto something.”

Billy nodded in gratitude.

“Can I go out and have my cigarette now?” she said.

Pavlicek tried to ring through as he was leaving the diner, the only one of them who hadn’t attempted to contact him in the days after Ramos. The others had stopped calling directly after his talk with Yasmeen, Billy assuming that no one wanted to risk a conversation that, if they said the wrong thing or adopted the wrong tone, might prompt him to change his mind. Yet Pavlicek hadn’t called even once, and so on the third attempted ring-through, coming forty minutes after the first, Billy yielded to his curiosity and picked up. But instead of getting Pavlicek on the other end, the voice Billy heard was Redman’s.

“It’s John Junior,” he said. “The funeral’s here on Thursday.”

Unlike the Homecoming for Martha Timberwolf, Junior’s service was standing room only.

At first, when he entered the already crowded chapel with his wife and kids, Billy wondered if he had it in him to let himself go, even just for this day. But when he saw Pavlicek, lumbering wild-eyed between the casket and Redman’s piano like a chained bear, he couldn’t help but wade through the crowd and grab him.

“It’s over now, right?” Pavlicek said too brightly, his breath rank with grief. “All over but the shoutin’.”

“Sure,” Billy said, wishing it were so.

“Come here,” Pavlicek taking Billy by the elbow and steering him to the side of the open coffin. “Look at this, can you believe this?” Touching his son’s rigid left pinkie sticking out from the folded repose of his crossed hands. “He looks like some fucking fop holding a teacup, and this here,” running a finger down the left side of Junior’s jaw, the skin there three shades darker than on the right, “and his hair, I don’t know what Redman was thinking but this kid never had a pompadour in his life.”

Pavlicek’s tone was crisp and snappy and jarringly unaffected by the tears that slipped down his face in sheets. “I mean, I never thought our friend was the greatest mortician on the planet, but this is ridiculous.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t get to work much on white people,” Billy said carefully.

“And see, I put this in,” pointing to his own gold shield tucked into a corner of the casket. “And this,” lifting out a framed photo of the two of them taken in Amsterdam a few years earlier. “And this,” a snapshot of Junior as a toddler with his mother before she tried to drown him. “I really debated putting that one in, but . . .”

The disconnect between voice and tears continued, Billy wondering how long he could keep it up.

“You ever read that?” Pavlicek asked, pointing to a paperback copy of
Steppenwolf
near Junior’s feet. “Last year he told me that it changed his life, so I tried to get through it a few times to see what he saw,” the tears finally beginning to climb into his throat, “but honestly? I thought it was crap. Anyways it’s all over now, right? All over but the shoutin’.”

“Johnny,” Billy said, stepping back from Junior’s body. “I’m dying for you.”

Embarrassed by his choice of words, Billy began to apologize, but he needn’t have bothered, given that Pavlicek had already turned away and was now engaged in giving Ray Rivera, father of the murdered Thomas, the same manic tour of the coffin and its contents as he had given Billy.

They were all there with their families, those who had families: Yasmeen, Dennis, and the girls; Redman, who had prepared the body but turned the service over to his father so he could participate purely as a mourner, standing with Nola, Rafer, and two of his six or seven other sons; and Jimmy Whelan, who at least had the sense for once not to bring a date.

They all made some sort of contact with Billy, mostly sober nods, a few terse greetings, Yasmeen going so far as to hug Carmen and make a quiet fuss over the kids. But for the most part they kept their distance, which he thought was more about letting sleeping dogs lie than anything else, and he was fine with it. He preferred it.

“I believe it’s time,” Redman’s father announced with soft authority, “for us all to be seated.”

Junior apparently had been utterly indifferent to the notion of any kind of God, and so Pavlicek, no Bible beater himself, passed on having any kind of religious celebrant and instead turned the program over to his son’s friends, who served up half a dozen well-spoken homages, an acoustical duet on “I’ll Fly Away,” and a teary solo of “Angels Among Us,” sung by a young woman who had been the closest thing Junior had had to a girlfriend in the last year of his life.

When the woman returned to her seat, a retired detective from Bronx Homicide, not on the program, spontaneously got up and sang an a cappella version of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” which had half the room weeping like babies, including Carlos and Declan, hardly more than babies themselves. Billy didn’t know what unnerved him more, his two sons’ intuitive empathy in a room beyond their experience or the sight of Jimmy Whelan, the childless, mateless, eternally diffident ghetto harem keeper, sobbing more loudly than anyone else. As for Billy himself, the last couple of weeks had utterly tapped him out, and it would take a lot more than a sad pop tune with a painful backstory to get him weeping.

Redman Senior, seemingly singing directly to Junior’s father, closed out the concert with “The Battle Is Not Yours.”

And then it was his time, Pavlicek rising from the front row, giving his back to the room as he silently leaned over the coffin—Billy could hear him whispering something to his son, but too indistinctly for anyone to make out—then finally turning to the assembled, the expression on his face near homicidal.

“I don’t know if anyone came here to celebrate John Junior’s life, but I certainly didn’t,” he said, gripping the podium as if he wanted to crush it. “I am here before you, I am here among you, to rage and curse God for the arbitrarily murdering fuck that he is, not that I’m the first parent ever to feel that way, and to grant myself at least one afternoon where suicide would be logistically difficult.”

Tickled by the profanity, Carlos looked up at Billy and grinned.

“You know, you read the papers after a young man dies in this city, someone’s always saying, ‘He was just starting to get his life together, he was just talking about going back to school, getting his GED, getting a job, talking about being a real father to his daughter, talking about getting away from the ’hood, about enlisting, about marrying his fiancée, he was just about to do this, to do that . . .’ All these ‘just’s, whether they were true or not, because they all died young and ‘just’ was all they had, tomorrow was all they had. And the same could be said for my boy. He was ‘just’ about to finish his schooling, he was ‘just’ about to find his own way in the world, ‘just’ about to show me the man that now, now, he’ll never get to be, the man that over the years would have null-and-voided every hardship, every heartache I’ve ever endured in my life.”

Pavlicek paused, returned to the coffin as if for a quick consultation, then turned back to the seats. “You want to hear what a great kid he was? How his heart was pure gold? How he loved life, loved people, loved a challenge, all that boilerplate et cetera, et cetera? For those of you who want to hear all that, consider it said. The fact of the matter was that he was just about to be, and now he’s not.”

Looking around the room Billy noted that all three of the WGs were in tears, their faces in various states of contortion. Even Redman, king of the poker face and impresario of seventy-five to a hundred memorials like this every year, was swiping at his cheeks with those mile-long fingers of his.

They had all killed or been complicit in a killing, out of passion but clear-eyed and purposefully, but they had no problem giving in to their grief when it came to one another. He had nearly lost his mind trying to bring them to justice, turning on his longtime friends in order to do what was right, what he thought was right, and as a result his own eyes on this day were as dry as sand. Still, they had all been so tight over the last two decades, had gone through so much together, and for one mad minute, Billy’s anger at them for excluding him from their murderous plans trumped his outrage at what they had done. But instead of passing, the anger lingered, Billy wondering if this pop-up fury he was experiencing over having been shut out from this most desperate of compacts between friends hadn’t been a part of his anger at them since the beginning.